Breach (Analog, #3)

by Eliot Peper

What better argument for inaction than the promise of future action? What better defenders of the status quo than well-meaning leaders who hedged?

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Teachers told us that our grades mattered, but really they were just an inaccurate and ineffective bureaucratic sorting mechanism.

We weren’t allowed to vote until we were eighteen, but the distinction between child and adult was totally arbitrary, just a number that someone decided on one day.

We called politicians leaders when they were often the most corrupt, vain, and...

Suddenly, everywhere I looked, I saw facts reveale...

institutional innovation has no more of an endpoint than its technological equivalent.

the colors we add to maps are a conceit.

proved money to be a figment of our imaginations. The only value money has is the...

But the problem with nations, money, religion, and other human constructs is that they’re convincing.

Sometimes we drink our own Kool-Aid. We lose track of first principles.”

Lowell and his pals want to protect their private property. But private property isn’t an actual thing, like granite or gravity. It’s just something we all agree to, like not cutting in line. We agree to private property because inequality is useful.

Wealth gives us a way to reward valuable work and trade with each other, benefiting everyone. But taken too far, inequality is deadly.

We’re motivated by relative—not absolute—wealth, so when a tiny minority seizes almost all the ...

People like Lowell might only make good decisions under duress, but you can do the right thing for the right reason right here, right now.

Rachel never broke her own rules because she knew that nothing was worth more than her word, that her dreams rested on her honor.

She had hated the place until circumstance forbade reclaiming it.

Silence at maximum volume.

You look like you got stuck in a BDSM dungeon and forgot the safe word.

The lack of opportunities to participate in the system was what inspired me to subvert it in the first place.”

In the long run, the only way to defeat your opponents is to empower them.

“He had it coming just doesn’t quite capture the rapturous joy of seeing the anvil of justice fall from heaven to crush the right asshole,”

John Rawls who wrote that “the fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.”